by George Sax

Bennett Miller’s Moneyball may be the best movie ever made about baseball. For that matter, it’s probably among the very best ever about sports. It’s almost certainly the most intelligent. And that achievement has come despite—or because of—taking its focus away from the playing field. Moneyball devotes scant time to showing us game action. (One scene in which a player hits balls in a batting cage is at least as long as the few that are set on the diamond.) The hackneyed visuals that directors have recourse to—slow-motion tracking of a homer, for example—are notably absent.

by George Sax

“Those atheists got it all wrong,” a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old tells a girl he’s just met in Brighton Rock. “There’s a hell, there’s flames, damnation, and torments.” This isn’t exactly a confession of faith, although Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley) may consider himself a “Roman.” He doesn’t attend church, and more to the point, he’s a criminally precocious enforcer for a small-time protection racket in Brighton, the English seaside resort. Yet, Pinkie tells this girl, Rose (Andrea Riseborough), the church “is all that makes sense.”

The title of this new drama isn’t entirely inappropriate: as the story goes on, the heroine of the story does indeed attempt to make public the misdeeds of her employer, in this case a military contractor working for the United Nations in Bosnia. But the impact of that pales next to the bulk of this fact-based film about human trafficking, a bland term for the lucrative practice of forcing women into sexual slavery.